Why I Do It: The Anonymous Hacker

An Anonymous Hacker Tells Us Why He Does It

Ever since they started loudly wreaking havoc in the mid-Noughties, self-styled “final boss of the internet” Anonymous has been called all manner of names. Not many of them pleasant.

With no fixed hierarchy and a membership scheme that’s as simple as posting online and/or donning a smirking Guy Fawkes mask, every Anonymous member’s story is ever so slightly different. They’re not, contrary to popular belief, a gang of lairy teenagers, sat in their mother’s basement, furiously typing with scant regard for the Caps Lock.

And, by way of proof, we scoured the depths of cyberspace to find Luke Harder (@anonyphant): a 35-year-old demolition worker, husband and father from Los Angeles.

And no, the irony that he leaves a pile of destruction in his wake whether at work or on the web is not lost on him. This is his story.

Luke Harder is my real name. I think a lot of people think it’s a pseudonym or a pun, but I didn’t hear anyone use the ‘Look Harder’ play on words until my own mother did when I was like 17 years old, and had lost something in the house.

I’m married to a beautiful young lady and have a wonderful, smart, 10-year-old son. My wife thinks me being an Anon is wonderful, but my son isn’t quite so privy to it. He knows the Guy Fawkes mask is the symbol for Anonymous, and almost went trick or treating in it this Halloween, like: ‘Give me a treat or I’ll hack your credit card’.

Outwardly, if you were to judge a book by its cover, my life is very normal. I like everything from fly-fishing to, I don’t know, playing video games with my kid.

People always ask whether I just blow up buildings. I don’t, and the number of people in demolition that work specifically with explosives is such a tiny percentage that it’s not even funny. I run heavy equipment, so we’ll take down houses or strip malls, things of that nature.

Politically speaking, my personal beliefs do not lie with either the red or blue team, I’m more of a – if you had to define it – libertarian. Society needs to catch up with technology, that’s what needs to happen. We’re exploring space, we have all this awesome technology, and yet we’re still playing in teams, like our geographical location on this planet matters. Having inter-species wars on the same planet is pretty low-level civilisation.

I’d been dabbling in politics, and I liked that Anonymous stuck up for the little guys that were telling the truth or trying to change the world. It was them standing up for WikiLeaks and, before that, Pirate Bay, that piqued my interest. I quickly did research and loved the origins of the group – chaos, hilarity and trolling people online, which is endless amounts of fun and causes no real damage – and thought “I love all those things”. It was like standing up for a good cause when there is one, then having a little fun on the side.

Everybody has their own MO. I don’t remember who said it first, but Anonymous is a group in the way that a group of birds is a flock. They’re only a flock because they happen to be flying together at that moment. But at any point in time birds could leave the flight formation, go and land in a tree, and other birds can join the flock. So there is no organisational structure, it’s the purest form of democracy, because there’s no one running it. There will never be a leader – people just wouldn’t stand for it.

I don’t even know how many members there are, but it’s gotta be over a million by this point. It has to be. There are celebrity Anons, which when I discovered them I was quite amused. It’s nice to know they’re paying attention to new laws being created and social injustice around the world. I did have the pleasure of running into a small-time celebrity at a protest, and they were kind enough to unmask themselves. I’d already figured out who it was, but it was still pretty damn cool.

Pure involvement with Anonymous isn’t enough to get arrested, however, using my real name also gives me the added bonus of having nothing to fear. Sometimes, when Anons disagree, they’ll do something called doxing – putting everybody’s private information online – which can cripple your ability to speak freely. So, by having my real name associated with my social media account, nobody can unmask me.

‘Hacker’ is a misunderstood, misused term. To call Anonymous all hackers is just wildly inaccurate. To me, it would be like calling myself a racecar driver just because I know how to drive. I reserve ‘hacker’ for the elite. If you look at the internet as a separate society, a hacker is like a superhero – you’re able to alter reality in a way a normal citizen cannot.

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